The descent of man

From hip comedies to highbrow literature, wherever you turn these days men are
routinely and mercilessly belittled, says William Leith

How are men doing these days? If you were from another planet, and had been watching television for a while, you’d say terribly.

You’d have a picture of men as losers and failures. You’d think they were tragic creatures, held in disrespect by women and also by themselves. You’d think they had no idea of how the world works; incapable of higher thoughts and in thrall to their grim sexual appetites, they flounder around, making a mess of everything.

Tragic, yes – but also comic, because you’d understand that men are the butt of jokes. The point of men, you would think, is to be laughed at.

As a man, I do a lot of laughing at men. It seems a long time since I laughed at the idiots in the sitcom Men Behaving Badly, but since then I’ve been amused by Mark and Jeremy, the stumbling anti-heroes of Peep Show, by Pete Griffiths, the dork from Pete Versus Life, by The Inbetweeners, the four silly boys who are poised on the brink of becoming four silly men, and by many others, such as the daft lads in The Midnight Beast who want to be rock stars.

I laugh because these programmes are genuinely funny, and this must be pointing me towards some deep truth hidden, or barely hidden, below the surface of our culture.

I also love The Big Bang Theory, an American sitcom about four guys who are actually geniuses but catastrophically socially inept. And I think Girls, the new American comedy in which young women are depicted as intelligent and perceptive, as well as emotionally complex, is hilarious. What are the men in it like? Well, they’re mostly idiots, of course.

And it’s not just in popular culture that men are being hauled over the coals. Backed by facts and figures, academics and commentators, such as Hanna Rosin in her new study, The End of Men: and the Rise of Women, are giving them a hard time, too.

What is all of this trying to tell me, I wonder? I should know by now because it’s been going on for a long time. I can’t remember a time when adverts didn’t depict men as lowly, unworthy creatures.

In a survey of 1,000 television adverts, the writer Frederic Hayward discovered that 'a hundred per cent of the jerks singled out in male-female relationships were male’. Also that 'a hundred per cent of the ignorant ones were male. A hundred per cent of the ones who lost a contest were male. A hundred per cent of the ones who smelt bad were male. A hundred per cent of the ones who were put down without retribution were male. A hundred per cent of the objects of rejection were male. A hundred per cent of the objects of anger were male. A hundred per cent of the objects of violence were male.’

But for a long time I just didn’t get it. My reaction was very male. I was in denial. What this male-bashing proved, I thought, was that men were strong. Men could take it. I watched the television programmes and all the adverts and I didn’t see a male crisis.

I didn’t see that, somewhere deep inside our culture, men were being held in contempt. I read children’s stories to my son, but it took me a couple of years to work out that pretty much all the bad characters, and pretty much all the dumb characters, too, were male.

This anti-guy thing, it was so prevalent I hardly noticed it, in the way a fish doesn’t notice the water he’s swimming in. Male-bashing wasn’t part of the cultural environment, it was the cultural environment.

In her book Stiffed: the Betrayal of the American Man, Susan Faludi said that men were beginning to feel betrayed by the world around them – bred to be strong and tough, they were discovering that these qualities no longer counted for much in the modern developed world.

For millennia, she pointed out, men had sought new frontiers. But now there were no new frontiers. We’d been everywhere. We’d hacked down the trees, killed the enemies, cleared the land. The last big frontier had been space – and, as a frontier, that had turned out to be a dud. A handful of guys had got to the moon. Then they turned around and came back, which, Faludi thought, was pretty symbolic.

And yet I still didn’t get it. Sour grapes on her part, I thought. The idea that we didn’t live in a man’s world – and that, therefore, we might be about to enter a woman’s world – felt very alien.

Meanwhile, I read lots of novels. And what were the guys like in these novels? Generally speaking, the better the novels were, the more inept the male characters. As the literary critic Elaine Blair has said of the typical contemporary American fictional character, 'His loserdom is total: it extends to his stunted career, his squalid living quarters, his deep unease in the world.’

This is not the world of writers of the previous generation, such as John Updike and Philip Roth, in which male characters tended to be successful, or at least self-satisfied. Blair thinks male novelists such as Sam Lipsyte, Gary Shteyngart and Jonathan Franzen are, in some deep sense, apologising to their female readers for being male, for having male interests and impulses – as she puts it, 'The characters’ rituals of self-loathing are tacitly performed for the benefit of an imagined female audience.’

And who is the audience, one wonders, when Michelle Obama, talking about her husband’s many small failings, says of the world’s anointed top man, 'He’s a gifted man, but he’s just a man’?

And who is Samantha Cameron addressing when she says her husband 'makes a terrible mess’ and can be 'quite annoying’? Are they just talking to women? In any case, women will hear them. Women will know what they mean. A lot of men won’t notice – just as it took me a long time to notice, and then understand, what was being said in all the sitcoms, all the adverts, all the children’s books, and all the novels.

What was being said? A simple truth – that our culture had reached a tipping-point. The patriarchy was toppling. Being a man was no longer a guarantee of power and supremacy. Now that we lived in a world where you didn’t need to be big and strong, men were no longer top dogs.

But – and here’s the reason for all the laughter – they still thought they were. Very malely, they were clinging on to this one idea – that they were in charge, and that this situation could never seriously be challenged.

All around us women are taking charge of things – of companies, of banks, of countries. As Rosin points out in The End of Men, lots of women, denied power for so long, are grasping it with the vigour of immigrants. And what are men doing? Drinking beer. Watching sport on television. Going fishing. Trying not to notice.

Rosin points out a hugely significant moment in the history of gender relations. In the 1970s a biologist called Ronald Ericsson figured out how to separate the two types of sperm – one for sons, and one for daughters. Some feminists didn’t like the idea. Wouldn’t this lead to a rash of mothers demanding sons? After all, this is what has happened throughout history. People always wanted sons. Think of all those Roman emperors and English kings pacing the stony corridors of their palaces, praying for a boy.

Now the technology of sperm sorting is even better. And guess what? Seventy-five per cent of mothers are asking for daughters. That’s a tipping-point. As Ericsson says, 'Women live longer than men. They do better in this economy. More of [them] graduate from college. They go into space and do everything men do, sometimes a whole lot better. I mean, hell, get out of the way – these females are going to leave us males in the dust.’

Might this be true? Yes, it might. Might. Of course, statistically men still earn more than women. If you look at the Government, power still looks very male. But this is the start of something. True, most chief executive officers (CEOs) are men, but most CEOs are in late middle-age. If a seismic shift is to happen, it will take a few years.

As Rosin says, technology is working against men. Technology cuts out the need for brute strength. These days what’s needed is people skills, empathy, good management and an ability to multitask. In other words, what’s needed in an information society is the ability to think like a woman.

And, from the very start, females are outperforming males. It begins at primary school. From the age of four girls think they are brighter and more successful than boys. They also think they work harder. Meanwhile, boys lag; a fifth of them are unable to write their own name by the age of five. After a year of education 17 per cent cannot hold a pencil or write from memory.

This goes on. More women than men are getting into university. After they graduate they find it easier to get jobs. In the world of finance, women are better at investing money. Research suggests this is because they are less blinded by competitive urges and think more before they make decisions.

Hedge funds run by women performed nearly twice as well as those run by men between 2000 and 2009 – women made an average of nine per cent against men’s 5.2 per cent. When the markets crashed female-run hedge funds dipped 9.6 per cent, while male-run funds dipped 19 per cent. And on and on.

Women are better at debt management. They are better at surfing the web, because their ability to multitask means they see more pop-ups and warnings. They have better memories. They are better at learning languages. Of course, you might say, this is all very well if you are a clever woman with all the advantages of a good education. But why should female empowerment not percolate throughout society?

Women have lots of advantages. They are better at asking for help. They eat more healthily, take fewer sick days, are more co-operative in the workplace. They have neater handwriting. Mark Ritson, an associate professor at the Melbourne Business School, says female brains are designed to be good at marketing. In the womb, he says, we all start with female brains. Then, at eight weeks, a testosterone surge in male foetuses destroys cells in the brain’s communication centre, and replaces them with cells for sex and aggression.

Might the patriarchy topple? A few years ago this would have seemed impossible. Soon it will seem plausible. It won’t be easy for men, of course. Men will find having to be house-husbands humiliating for a generation or so; they are still deeply uneasy, for the most part, when their female partners earn more than they do.

And it won’t be easy for women, either. As Hanna Rosin says, now that women don’t depend on men for economic security, 'they have no urgent incentive to keep the price of sex high’. But as many women still feel ambivalent about promiscuity, it might take a generation or so to sort that out.

Something is happening. The balance of power is shifting. Men are no longer always the top dogs. Soon they will realise it. We’ll know when the tipping-point has truly occurred. The men in adverts, and sitcoms, and children’s books, and novels, will start to change. One day they won’t all be idiots. Soon after that they will begin to shape up – they will look smart and sassy. That really will be the end of men.